Yarrow House
T here was a moment of cool silence in the room, like the silence that follows a gunshot when hunters are in the woods.
Victoria didn’t say anything. Kate took one look at her soft, bewildered eyes and saw that her mother’s pronouncement had flown over her head.
“Victoria is my sister,” Kate repeated.
“Yes, so you bloody well better go there and make sure her marriage goes through before she’s ruined. Because she’s your sister.”
A little pulse of relief rushed through Kate’s veins. She must have misunderstood, she had—
“She’s your half sister,” Mariana clarified, her voice grating.
“But—she’s—” Kate turned to Victoria. “How old are you?”
“You know how old I am,” Victoria said, snuffling a bit as she rubbed her lower lip. “I’m almost exactly five years younger than you.”
“You’re eighteen,” Kate said. Her heart was thumping in her chest.
“Which makes you a ripe twenty-three,” Mariana said pleasantly. “Or perhaps twenty-four. At your age, it’s easy to forget.”
“Your husband, the colonel—”
Mariana shrugged.
Kate found herself struggling to breathe. She felt as if her whole life were unfolding in front of her, all the questions she never knew she had. The shock of her father coming home, just two weeks after her mother’s funeral, and saying that he was planning to marry by special license.
Her mother lying in bed all those years, and her father popping his head in now and then to say cheerful things and toss kisses in her direction but never to sit by his wife’s side.
Because apparently he’d been sneaking off to sit with Mariana.
“I feel as if I’m missing something,” Victoria said, looking from one to the other. “Are you going to cry, Kate?”
Kate recoiled. She had never cried, not since her father’s funeral. “Of course not!” she snapped.
There was another beat of silence in the room.
“Why don’t you do the honors?” Kate said finally, looking at her stepmother. “I’m agog to learn the particulars.”
“The particulars are none of your business,” Mariana stated. Then she turned to Victoria. “Listen, darling, you remember how we used to see dearest Victor even before we came to live in this house?”
Victor! Kate had never thought for a moment that her father’s name had any connection to that of her stepsister.
“Yes,” Victoria agreed. “We did.”
“That would be because your mother was his mistress,” Kate said. “I gather he visited your house for at least eleven years, before my mother died. Was there a colonel at all? Is Victoria illegitimate?” she asked Mariana.
“It hardly matters,” Mariana said coolly. “I can provide for her.”
Kate knew that. Her beloved, foolish father had left everything to his wife . . . and Mariana had turned it into a sweet dowry for Victoria, and be damned whether the estate needed the income. It was all Victoria’s now.
Who was not only pregnant, but illegitimate. One had to suppose that the colonel, Mariana’s putative first husband, had never existed.
Mariana got up and stubbed out her cigarillo in a dish overflowing with half-smoked butts. “I am shocked beyond belief that the two of you haven’t sprung to your feet and hugged each other in an excess of girlish enthusiasm. But since you haven’t, I’ll make this short. You will go to Pomeroy Castle, Katherine, because your sister is carrying a child and needs the approval of the prince. You will dress as your sister, you will take the bloody mongrels with you, and you will make this work.”
Mariana looked tough, and more tired than she usually did. “In that case, you will keep the Crabtrees in their cottage,” Kate stated.
Her stepmother shrugged. She didn’t really give a damn either way, Kate realized. She had launched the Crabtrees into the situation just in case the plea of blood relations failed.
“I’ve summoned the same man who cut Victoria’s hair,” Mariana said briskly. “He’ll be here tomorrow morning to cut off all of that rot on your head. Three seamstresses are coming as well. You’ll need at least twenty gowns altered.”
“You’ll be at the castle for three or four days,” Victoria said.
She got to her feet, and for the first time, Kate recognized that her sister was indeed going to have a child. There was something slightly clumsy about the way she moved.
“I’m sorry,” Victoria said, walking over to stand before Kate.
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry for!” Mariana interjected.
“Yes, there is,” she insisted. “I’m sorry that our father was the sort of man he was. I’m not sorry that he married my mother, but I’m—I’m just sorry about all of it. About what you must think of him now.”
Kate didn’t want to think about her father. She had tried not to think of him in the last seven years, since his death. It was too painful to think about the way he laughed, and the way he would stand by the fireplace and tell her amusing stories of London, reflected firelight glinting from his wineglass.
And now there was a whole new reason to not think of him.
She returned Victoria’s embrace politely, then disengaged herself and turned to Mariana. “Why must I come to dinner tonight?”
“Lord Dimsdale has some doubt that you two look enough alike to fool someone who might have met your sister.”
“But my hair—”
“It’s not the hair,” her stepmother said. “We’ll put you in a decent gown and you’ll see the resemblance soon enough. Victoria is known for her beauty, her dogs, and her glass slippers. As long as you don’t indulge your churlish tongue, you’ll pass.”
“What on earth is a glass slipper?” Kate asked.
“Oh, they’re marvelous!” Victoria cried, clasping her hands together. “I brought them into fashion myself this season, Kate, and then everyone started wearing them.”
“Your feet are about the same size,” Mariana said. “They’ll fit.”
Kate looked down at her tired, gray gown and then up at her stepmother. “What would you have done if my father had lived? If I had debuted when I was supposed to and people recognized the resemblance between myself and Victoria?”
“I didn’t worry about it,” Mariana said with one of her shrugs.
“Why not? Wouldn’t there have been the risk that someone would have seen the two of us together and guessed?”
“She’s five years younger than you. I would have kept her in the schoolroom until you married.”
“I might not have taken. I might not have found a husband. My father would have . . .”
A smile twisted the corner of Mariana’s lips. “Oh, you would have taken. Don’t you ever look in the mirror?”
Kate stared at her. Of course she looked in the mirror. She saw her perfectly regular features staring back at her. She didn’t see Victoria’s dewy eyes, or her light curls, or her charming smile, because she didn’t have any of those.
“You’re a bloody fool,” Mariana said, reaching out for her cigarillo case and then dropping it again. “I’m smoking too many of these, which is entirely your fault. For God’s sake, get yourself into a decent dress by eight this evening. You’d better go see Victoria’s maid straight off; you’re not fit to scrub the fireplace in that rag you’re wearing.”
“But I don’t want Algie to see my lip like this,” Victoria said, sniffing.
“I’ll instruct Cherryderry to put a single candelabrum on the table,” her mother said. “Dimsdale won’t be able to see a rat if it jumps on the plate in front of him.”
So it all came back to the rats, which was fitting, because that’s where the story began.